Whack a Mole

🕹️ How to play

1. How to start the whack a mole game: It runs straight in the browser — nothing to download, no account. Pick a difficulty and a 30 or 60 second round, hit Start and the clock begins; the first brown mole pops up about a second later, ready to be tapped.
2. How to score in whack a mole: Every mole stays up for a fixed amount of time. Tap it before it ducks back down: brown +10, speedy +25, golden +50. Use your thumb on a phone, the mouse on a desktop, or the numeric keypad — 7 8 9 / 4 5 6 / 1 2 3 map onto the nine burrows.
3. How the whack a mole combo multiplier works: Keep landing taps without missing and the combo climbs. Every 4 hits raise the multiplier one tier: ×1.00 → ×1.25 → ×1.50 → ×1.75 → ×2.00 at the cap. The multiplier is applied to every base value, so the second half of a clean round is worth far more than the first.
4. Which mole you should never tap: The one in the red-and-white hard hat. Tapping it costs no points, but your combo resets to zero and you have to rebuild the multiplier from scratch. It stays up 1.5 seconds — longest of all four — so there is time to see it. Easy mode leaves it out entirely, which makes that setting the one to hand to a child.
5. What the end-of-round summary tells you: When the clock hits zero you get score, hits versus wasted taps with an accuracy percentage, best combo and the record for that exact setting — plus how many golden moles you caught and how many moles slipped away untouched. Play again restarts instantly; Pass the phone pins your score as the next player's target.

📖 Rules & variants

Whack a mole rules: the field is nine fixed burrows numbered 0–8, with the four corners at {0, 2, 6, 8}. Moles pop up one at a time and each kind stays up for a fixed window — brown 1.2s, speedy 0.7s, golden 0.9s, hard hat 1.5s. Difficulty changes how densely they appear and scales the windows, but no window ever drops below 0.6 seconds on any setting. The countdown reaching zero is the only way a round ends: no lives, no early game over.

What each mole is worth: brown mole +10 (any burrow), speedy mole +25 (visibly smaller, violet speed lines), golden mole +50 (corner burrows only, which is why the four corners wear a permanent gold ring), hard-hat mole 0 and never to be tapped (it only uses non-corner burrows). Your points are the base value multiplied by the current combo multiplier, rounded to a whole number.

How the combo and the combo break work: consecutive hits build the combo, and every 4 of them raise the multiplier a tier up to ×2.00. Exactly two things reset it — a wasted tap on empty ground, and tapping the hard-hat mole. Neither subtracts points; the cost is that everything after them is worth less. A mole ducking back down on its own does not break the combo, because you never actually made a mistake.

Does whack a mole get harder: yes, but not by shrinking your reaction window. The round is split into four equal stages and each opens up density and variety — the first quarter is brown moles only, speedy ones join at 25%, golden and hard-hat moles arrive together at 50%, and from 75% up to four (five on hard) can share the field. Individual pop-up windows never shrink, so the pressure comes from how many places you must watch, not from raw speed.

When the golden mole appears: never by luck. The count is fixed the moment the round starts — exactly 3 in a 30 second round and exactly 6 in a 60 second round — spread evenly between 50% and 80% of the clock, and always in one of the four corners. That is what makes two rounds on the same setting comparable: nobody gets a round with zero golden moles, and nobody gets a round full of them.

Ways to play: 30-second sprint compresses the whole curve for a single-commute round; easy mode slows the moles and removes the hard hat, which is the setting for playing with a small child; pass the phone lets a group take turns on one device with the previous score pinned as a target; and the no-miss challenge is a house rule — forget total score, see who can claim the +100 precision bonus, which needs zero wasted taps AND at least half of the round's whackable moles actually hit (that participation floor is why tapping twice and sitting still never earns it).

How records are kept: three difficulties times two round lengths make six independent records that never overwrite each other. They are written to your own browser storage — nothing is uploaded, there is no leaderboard and no account, so clearing your browser data or switching devices clears them. If storage is blocked the game still plays through to the summary, it simply says the device is not saving anything.

Playing on a phone: portrait one-handed play is the main scenario, so the 3×3 grid sits inside thumb reach and every burrow keeps a touch target well above 88 pixels. The stage owns its own touch gestures, so fast tapping never drags the page or triggers a double-tap zoom, while everything outside the stage scrolls normally. Turning the phone sideways rearranges the screen into a HUD column plus a square grid — there is no forced-rotation overlay.

❓ FAQ